Somewhere in between Lego and Origami, is the world of Japanese miniature paper crafts. I know, I’ve been on the weird and wonderful side of the internet again today, getting very familiar with a company called Sankei, a Japanese paper craft company that sells all their scale model paper craft kits on Amazon. While you’re…

Inside a nondescript Brooklyn building, there’s a door to an imaginary world with beautiful random objects, edible flowers, bicycles … and a secret Japanese restaurant. We’re not talking about just another social dining club and a have-a-go chef, but a seriously gifted host whose level of cooking is being whispered about as a talent which far surpasses anything…

To send you off for the weekend, here are the seventeenth century Japanese fart scrolls you didn’t ask for. The unusual images from an Edo period between 1603 and 1868, are known as ‘He-gassen’, which can only be translated as “fart battle” or “competition” and they’re all about, well, farting! It’s Friday, and on Fridays, I get…

Getting to work on propellor-driven high-speed swans, robots babysitting the kids while the parents are having tea in space and epic underwater battles with giant starfish; just another day in Japanese retro future! A series of vintage magazine illustrations reveal Japan’s grandparents of today had a very imaginative, if not worrying vision for the future– let’s…

These women are the last of their kind. In their floral wetsuits, they fill their lungs with air and dive for long periods of time deep into the Pacific ocean, with nothing more than a mask and flippers. They are known as Ama and make a living hunting for abalone, a sea snail that produces pearls.…

A London friend emailed me an article this morning about tourists visiting the French capital, specifically Japanese, who fall prey to what is known as the ‘Paris syndrome’. Around a million Japanese travel here every year (yeesh), many expecting the fairytale vacation they once saw in a Woody Allen movie. But an average of up…